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Posted on 03/20/2015 10:58:12 AM PDT by SoConPubbie
The recent kerfuffle over the Iowa GOP and questions surrounding federal subsidies has prompted a renewed (and long overdue) look at just where your tax dollars are going when Uncle Sam hands out subsidies. One of the larger expenditures is the money paid out to help small farmers who produce the food the nation needs, but are subject to the vagaries of weather, insects and all manner of threats to their crops. It’s a story as old as the nation and its roots go back to a time when the government was actually attempting to do something useful. Unfortunately, as this report in the Washington Free Beacon reveals, the remaining, actual small farmers benefiting from these programs is overshadowed by very wealthy individuals and corporations which suck up large quantities of the cash.
Federal crop insurance subsidies went to billionaires, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) program provides subsidies to cover the crop losses for farmers, regardless of their income. The GAO report, released Wednesday, found that thousands of individuals with incomes over $500,000 have received $317 million in subsidies over five years, and not all were farmers.
“Some of the highest income participants received income from operating large farms, but others received some of their income from nonfarming sources, according to our analysis,” the GAO said. “For example, more than 70 of the crop insurance participants we identified as among the highest income during 1 or more years from 2009 through 2013 were managers or professionals, including attorneys, executives, or physicians.”
Four of the people who received more than $100K in subsidies were billionaires. Some of the other billionaire “farmers” earned the majority of their wealth from “mining, real estate, sports, and information technology.” There were plenty of lower income folks who could clearly use the help, but one analyst estimated that by simply trimming back the insurance subsidy payments to the most wealthy claimants the government could be saving $70M per year. Just think about that. Seventy million here, seventy million there… pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
Just to be clear, I’m not begrudging those high earners their billions. Good for them! This is America and we want everyone to succeed. But if you’re doing that well and farming is only a minor part of your activities, do you really need to be collecting taxpayer funded subsidy checks? And yet this is what localized interests like the Iowa GOP are willing to go to the mat for. And as long as we keep putting forward a parade of candidates for high office who are willing to bend their knee to these interest groups, nothing is going to change. We’re fortunate that people like Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina have started breaking the mold and refusing to play along.
(Fiorina didn’t make it to the AG summit, but sent Hot Air this statement when we covered the results.)
The right answer ultimately is that the government shouldn’t be in the business of subsidizing anything. Subsidies and a variety of tax credits distort the markets. But we need to phase out subsidies for sugar, oil and renewable fuels but do it at the same time so that we’re not disadvantaging any one state or industry.
Unfortunately, as important as this subject is for many conservatives, it gets swept under the carpet when the world is going up in flames and scandals swamp the headlines. But if the debates this time around are handled by responsible people who are interested in informing the voters rather than engaging in gotcha games, perhaps the issue will make it back into the national discussion.
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CRUZ or LOSE!Subsidized crop insurance is typically the only subsidy most actual farmers receive. It could easily be provided by the free market.
Farm subsidies played a important role in keeping family farms afloat early on, but the subsidies became too large and transferable. Companies in tobacco land, for instance, if they bought 1000 acres on which to build an industrial plant, also got the tobacco allotments assigned to the farms although the companies were nor agricultural. They just leased the acreage out to neighboring farmers to grow on their farm. Then the corporate farms became the rage, bought out the family farms and now we have corporate welfare because of it.
Frankly, that Scott Walker aide had a good point about Iowa being overprivileged. The primaries should move to some kind of random-draw order or something.
That’s what makes food stamps so untouchable, right?
Ag lobby + Democrat statists = major force
(the Dems were GENIUS to put food stamps under the Agriculture Dept!)
I say we go in decreasing order of R voter percentage in previous POTUS race.
At the very least no blue wall states in the first 20.
Somehow I stumbled on some info about farm subsidies and saw that my step-niece and her husband, who own a pretty small farm in east central IA, receive about $80,000 per year in farm subsidies. This seemed to be a consistent number of what they would get year to year. I am pretty sure my family would find an extra $80,000 per year “gift” to be quite helpful to our household.
There’s a farmer in my home county in S. IA that has collected more than $1 milion in these payments.
>> There’s a farmer ... that has collected more than $1 milion in these payments.
Can you rent a fancy limo and a tuxedo for an afternoon?
Sure would be fun to stand out in front of his place and beg for donations. The cardboard sign you carry could say something like “$1 million in Gummn’t handouts is chump change - I needs more!”
Subsidies like this started as far back as the Civil War. (Subsidies for building ropes and lines for sailing ships) Reagan once said that the closest thing to immortality is a Government program. He was of course correct.
His son does field work for the old man, yet he’s a deadbeat.
“There was once a government program called the Payment in Kind Program (PIK) where the government paid growers to not grow cereals crops i.e., wheat.””
There once was a farmer in NY State who ran for congress and won after campaigning for office on receiving subsidies for not growing corn. It’s been many years and I think I recall that he drove around in a Cadillac with a sign that said, “I bought this car for payment received for not growing corn” or some such slogan. Also I’m again recalling from my memory he was from Big Flats, NY and his name was Smith.
My memory turns out to be faulty - as this is the guy and he was a NY State Senator for years...Thank Gore for the internet so we don’t always end up looking like fools..
http://www.the-leader.com/article/20100331/News/303319908
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